 Hello, my name is Roger Watson and I am the Editor-in-Chief of Nurse Education and Practice and that is published by Elsevier. In this session I want to give you some top tips to becoming a better academic writer. These tips are not specific to any particular kind of article or to any journal, they are general. Whenever I speak to people about writing for publication and offering them my advice, I always start at the same place. I always say, write for a specific journal. Have a journal in mind before you start and aim to write in that journal. Therefore you must read the guidelines for that journal and I would also advise you to take a look at some of the articles in the journal just to familiarise yourself with the way that people write for that journal, in other words what the editors want. Clearly if you submit to that journal and you happen to be rejected, which does happen, you will have to start again and find another journal and the process starts again. So always have a journal in mind, read the guidelines for that journal and familiarise yourself with the contents. When you're writing always have a plan in mind, not just a plan for the paper but a plan for your writing. The plan for the paper is that it should be organised and you should organise it under the headings and the subheadings given to you by the journal. They will give you a structure for each type of paper. Follow that structure. One really good thing that I always do is I create a document and put in all the headings that they give you with a page break and then I start filling in under those headings. You don't have to start at the beginning and work your way through to the end. You can start anywhere in the paper. I would also advise you to have in mind and keep telling yourself this is going to be a really good paper. Visualise yourself writing a great paper and don't make it mundane, don't make it ordinary, don't make it like other papers. Try to be clear that you have something to say and try to say it clearly and try to say it concisely. I would always advise people to write to a plan in terms of time. Now what I usually advise people to do is to have a certain number of words in mind to write either every day or every time you sit down to write. I actually find that half an hour at the beginning of the day may be shortening your lunch break or spending some time at your computer before you go home. Just short times, quality times often help you to progress your writing. Now when it comes to the actual writing, most academic writing or at least the best academic writing is concise. Try to use as few words as possible and try to convey your arguments as clearly and concisely as possible. Now this may not be something that you can do as you write. I would strongly advise you not to worry too much about the final product as you are writing. I would get your ideas down and then go back and edit them later and make them concise. Check the wording. Can you remove words? It's nearly always possible to remove words and to use even shorter words and more clear and concise words. Try to avoid using colloquialisms, everyday speech idioms. Try to avoid cliches at all costs. Try to use the active voice at all times. So avoid saying things like the researcher did. If you did it, say I did. If it's a team that you're writing with, we did. It's more direct, it's clear who did it and it uses fewer words. So try to use the active voice. Another good tip for writing particularly in English is to vary the sentence structure and the sentence length. Clearly you need sentences. They shouldn't be too long and they shouldn't really be too short and staccato. And then your sentences are organised into paragraphs of course. But in terms of sentences try to have some that are long and some that are short. If they're all very short it's difficult to read. If they're all too long it's very difficult to understand. And what I like to think about is that your sentence structure is really like gentle waves on water. In other words they should go up and down gently and help the person, give them a rhythm as they are reading through your manuscript. And do try not to make your paragraphs too long. A paragraph should gather together sentences that all refer to the same ideas. But there's an aesthetic aspect to paragraphs too. In other words if they're too long do try to find somewhere sensible to break them up. Avoid repeating things. If you've tell somebody something don't say it in exactly the same words again. So once you've written your manuscript and maybe of the required length it may be a little bit too long. But you should go through and edit it and also of course at the same time proofread it. Now it can be very hard to proofread your own writing. But try to put it away for a while. Maybe even for a day and go back to it. But if you find it really difficult to proofread your own writing and most of us leave errors in our own writing. Ask someone else to do it. And I always think it's a really good idea from the point of view of editing, from the point of view of readability, cutting downwards and proofreading to always give your writing to someone else to look at. Especially if you are an inexperienced writer.